Numbers increasingly govern public services. Both policymaking activities and administrative control are increasingly structured around calculations such as cost-benefit analyses, estimates of social and financial returns, measurements of performance and risk, benchmarking, quantified impact assessments, ratings and rankings, all of which provide information in the form of a numerical representation. Through quantification, public services have experienced a fundamental transformation from “government by rules” to “governance by numbers”, with fundamental implications not just for our understanding of the nature of public service itself, but also for wider debates about the nature of citizenship and democracy. This project scrutinizes the relationships between quantification, administrative capacity and democracy across three policy sectors (health/hospitals, higher education/universities, criminal justice/prisons) and four countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, UK). It offers a cross-national and cross-sectoral study of how managerialist ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted and how they mattered. More specifically, it examines (i) how quantification has travelled across sectors and states; (ii) relations between quantification and administrative capacity; and (iii) how quantification has redefined relations between public service and liberal democratic understandings of public welfare, notions of citizenship, equity, accountability and legitimacy.

The research is being conducted by a multidisciplinary team of social scientists based in the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at Mines ParisTech (France), the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University (Germany), the Department of Management Accounting and Control at Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg (Germany) and the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University (Netherlands).

The three year research project is supported by more than €1.9million in research grant funding awarded through the “Open Research Area (ORA) for the Social Sciences” programme by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) and the Nederlands Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, Netherlands).

Lodge, M., & Mennicken (forthcoming 2019). Reflecting on Public Service Regulation by Algorithm. Accepted for publication in “Algorithmic Regulation” edited by Lodge, M. and Yeung, K., Oxford University Press.

M. Huber and M. Hillebrandt, “Pay for Promise in Higher Education”: The Influence of NPM on Resource Allocation in German Universities, Historical Social Research, 44 (2) – accepted for publication, 2019

J. Reilley and T. Scheytt, A Calculative Infrastructure in the Making: The Emergence of a Multi-Layered Complex for Governing Healthcare, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, forthcoming (2019)

M. Hillebrandt and E. Ruijer: Panel on Quantified transparency in public service delivery: the (unforeseen) consequences of open managerial data, 6th Global Conference on Transparency Research, Rio de Janeiro, 26-27 June 2019.

J. Reilley, C. Huber: Attendance of International Workshop ‘New Public Sector Conference’ University of Edinburgh, 8-9 November 2018

M. Hillebrandt: Guaranteeing Equality in the Higher Education Sector: Through, or in Spite of Quantification?, Netherlands Institute of Governance conference, The Hague, 1-2 November 2018

Raaphorst, N. (2018). Street-level bureaucrats in ‘the iron cage’ of numbers? An empirical comparison of prison guards, university teachers and nurses in the Netherlands. Presented at the Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG) Annual Work Conference, 1-2 November 2018, Leiden, The Netherlands.

M. Hillebrandt: Attendance of International Workshop ‘The Role of Visibility in Academic Evaluation: (E)valuation Studies in Science and Higher Education’, DZHW/Humboldt Universität, Berlin, 15-16 October 2018

Raaphorst, N. (2018). Street-level bureaucrats in ‘the iron cage’ of numbers? An empirical comparison of prison guards, university teachers and nurses in the Netherlands. Presented at the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA) Conference, 4-5 September 2018, Lausanne, Switzerland.

N. Iloga Balep and C. Huber: Quantifying the ‘in-between’ of prisons using indicators: The tension between security and resocialization through the lens of liminality, 41th Annual EAA Conference, Bocconi University, Milan, 29 May 2018

A. Mennicken: Invited presentation at conference “Technology and the disruption of professional work”, King’s Business School, King’s College London, May 2018; paper presented “Regulation of and by algorithm” (co-authored with Lodge)

N. Iloga Balep and J. Junne: “Free” and “Unfree” Money in German Prisons: The Role of Budgets in Reconstructing Prisoners as Citizens, 22nd IRSPM Conference, University of Edinburgh, 11-13 April 2018

M. Huber: The Risk University. Buenos Aires, 22 March 2018

J. Reilley, T. Scheytt: Negotiating metrics in the public sector: Variations of performance management in prisons and hospitals, Organization and Valuation Workshop, DGS, University of Bremen, February 2018

M. Hillebrandt: Quantifying the User in Public Sector Regulatory Reform, Netherlands Institute of Government Annual Work Conference, 10 November 2017

M. Huber: From “Pay per performance” to “Pay for Promise”: The effects of allocation models on the German universities, Workshop on Governing by Numbers: Key Indicators and the Politics of Expectations, University of Halle-Wittenberg, 5-7 October 2017

A. Mennicken: Invited presentation on “Accounting, Economizing, Democratizing” (with P. Miller, LSE); Foucault, Political Life and History working group led by Colin Gordon and Patrick Joyce, London, February 2017

A. Mennicken: Invited presentation at workshop “From Prices to Prizes and Vice Versa”, University of Bologna, January 2017; paper presented “Quantifying and Valuing Life at the Margins: Ratings and Rankings in Healthcare and Correctional Services”

Organisation of Workshop “Quantification in Crisis” at the LSE (with L. Cabane, CARR, LSE), 15 December 2016 (workshop was part of the CARR ESRC Seminar Series “Regulation in Crisis” and jointly organised with the French IFRIS Seminar Series “The shaping and government of crises”)